LAN Switch Security: What Hackers Know About Your Switches

Chapter 12. Introduction to Denial of Service Attacks

A denial of service (DoS) attack is characterized as an attacker’s explicit attempt to prevent legitimate users of a service from using that service. Here are some examples of these attacks:

• Attempts to flood a network, thereby preventing legitimate network traffic

• Attempts to disrupt a server by sending more requests than it can handle, thereby preventing access to a service

• Attempts to crash the device or the service by sending it malformed packets

• Attempts to prevent a particular individual from accessing a service

• Attempts to disrupt service to a specific system or person

How Does a DoS Attack Differ from a DDoS Attack?

A distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) is defined as follows:

A distributed ...